Prompted to leave Ireland by poor harvests, rising rents, low linen prices, and political oppression, 100,000 to 150,000 Irish immigrants arrived in the United States between 1783 and 1814. Many had been members of the Society of United Irishmen in the 1790s. This society of Protestants and Catholics first sought religious freedom, parliamentary reforms, universal male suffrage, and less British interference in Irish affairs. The society ultimately armed and pursued an Irish republican government independent of Britain. But the Irish Rebellion of 1798 failed. In the resulting backlash, the British government dissolved the relatively separate Irish parliament and, in the 1801 Act of Union, made Ireland fully a part of the United Kingdom. United Irishmen immigrated to the United States before and after the rebellion. These political exiles sustained their republican vision and reorganized in the United States, founding an American Society of Irishmen in 1797 in Philadelphia and branches from New York to South Carolina. In American society generally, they became active Republicans and their influence extended well beyond immigrant communities.1 As Kevin Whelan has noted, Irish immigrants, and United Irishmen in particular, applied skills they had polished in Ireland to contribute to the first party system's rhetoric and help create a “national profile” for Jeffersonian republicanism.2They also made music. While David A. Wilson has observed that many United Irishmen in the United States were musicians, their musical lives and activities have received little attention.3 Uncovering the musical lives of exiled United Irishmen in Petersburg, Virginia, this article reveals how they used music to articulate dual allegiances to the homeland they left behind and their adopted land. By doing so, they enacted contemporary notions of virtual citizenship, disseminated through music a vision of transatlantic republicanism, and made a unique contribution to the sustained production of antiquarian and romantic collections of Irish music.After providing context for their publication of Irish music, this article introduces three United Irishmen of Petersburg—John Daly Burk, John McCreery, and Dr. Thomas Robinson; explains how their lives in the United States were consistent with contemporary concepts of citizenship; elaborates their vision for publishing Irish music in the United States; details their music's reception among Irish immigrants; and assesses the results of their publication efforts. Examining their musical activities contributes an important case study that deepens our understanding of how musical expression was one of the means through which immigrants enacted an early nineteenth-century concept of virtual citizenship and articulated revolutionary transatlantic republicanism. These United Irishmen of Petersburg made a multifaceted effort to engage both radical Irish and broader American audiences through music that responded to immigrants’ own experiences and memories, trends in publishing Irish music for English-speaking audiences, and contemporary American political developments that they interpreted through the lens of revolutionary transatlantic republicanism.Several trends in the collection, printing, and consumption of Irish music that began in Europe shaped how United Irishmen conceptualized and produced new music in the United States. Irish songs were sold in formats ranging from fashionable song collections to cheap ballads.4 Irish characters and experiences were variously represented in comic ballads, heroic ballads, and idealized representations of a distant past conjured through ancient symbols and names. Comic songs sold as street ballads and performed in English theater often caricatured Irish men as intoxicated, dumb, and good-natured. In contrast, the United Irishmen used the ballad tradition to write politically inspiring words for existing tunes, often featuring mythic and heroic national imagery.5Irish songs from oral traditions were transcribed and printed in antiquarian collections. In the eighteenth century, collections of Irish music were issued in London and Dublin. Several publications adapted this music to instruments used in other musical traditions, including German flute, violin, and pianoforte, and applied conventions such as Italian tempo markings.6 Particularly influential was Edward Bunting's A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music (1796), which presented Irish airs and compositions collected from Irish harpers adapted for the pianoforte, with Gaelic titles translated into English. Bunting, a classically trained organist and pianist, was commissioned to transcribe the instrumental and vocal music played by the Irish harpers who convened at the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792.7 Such antiquarian collections strove to “rescue” this Irish music circulating in oral tradition from “oblivion.” Narratives accompanying song collections offered correctives to historical claims made by Scottish poet James Macpherson and the near erasure of Irish music from English histories of music by Dr. Charles Burney and Sir John Hawkins. These alternative narratives fused musical and political content, often highlighting English aggression against the Irish in the Middle Ages and Tudor periods and using the figures of the Irish bards and blind Irish harper Turlough Carolan (1670–1738) to portray the richness of Irish music.8 Even as authors strove to distinguish Ireland's musical past, the titles, organization, and advertisements of collections often situated the collection of Irish songs in relation to similar efforts of collecting Scottish and Welsh songs, as seen in George Thomson's national song projects.9Collections illustrated both antiquarianism and Romanticism and often targeted English-speaking middle- and upper-class audiences. To address the barrier of Gaelic lyrics for English-speaking audiences in England and Ireland, collectors removed lyrics, as in Bunting's A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music; translated them, as in Charlotte Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789); or provided new English lyrics, as in Thomas Moore's successful Irish Melodies (1808), which drew on Bunting's melodies in an effort to reanimate rather than preserve this music.10 Moore used these melodies to carry new lyrics that conjured an “ancient, bucolic version of Ireland” and conveyed “overwhelming nostalgic grief.”11 In fact, the broad appeal and success of Moore's approach led Bunting to realize his subsequent volumes with a greater commodity orientation.12 At the same time, as Harry White has noted, Bunting's decision not to include Gaelic lyrics in his second collection may have had a political motive, as the transcriber of those lyrics gave evidence that led to the execution of a United Irishman who was a close friend of Bunting's housemates, the McCracken family.13These collections reached audiences in the United States as well. Sarah Gerk notes that Moore's songs, for example, were understood there in relation to the two countries’ shared British oppressor, even though by situating his characters in a distant past, “removed from British domination and industrial revolution,” Moore found a way of “avoiding the contemporaneous political quagmire.” One US writer suggested that Americans should feel sympathy for Irish “oppression and suffering.” Gerk observes that in the United States, “[f]or many, the collection was the product of a particularly close ally within transatlantic revolutionary networks.”14 By the early nineteenth century, United Irishmen in Petersburg, Virginia, decided to contribute to these publication trends across the Atlantic.Petersburg became home to a sizable Irish immigrant community whose members understood and enacted citizenship in varied ways consistent with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thought. Petersburg was a thriving mercantile area that attracted immigrants, including many United Irishmen who joined its sizable Irish immigrant community, contributed to local amateur music-making, held seats in various local organizations, and became actively involved in political matters as committed Republicans. Incorporated in 1784 on Appomattoc tribal lands, Petersburg's location on the Appomattox River gave merchants access to the Atlantic Ocean. The river supplied waterpower for burgeoning industry, which included mills, an iron foundry, and tobacco factories and warehouses. Despite the town's mud-filled streets and risks of typhoid and yellow fever, many artisans plied their trades as bakers, blacksmiths, soap and candle makers, coach makers, saddlers, and manufacturers of buildings and boats. Residents and visitors enjoyed taverns, theaters, racecourses, schools, and traveling amusements such as live elephants, dancers, and tightrope walkers.15By 1790, Petersburg was Virginia's third largest town with roughly 3000 residents. About half were enslaved blacks. The town's free black population exceeded 1000 by the early nineteenth century. White residents included native Virginians, New England transplants, and Scottish, Irish, English, and French immigrants. Petersburg steadily attracted Irish immigrants, who experienced homesickness and grief over separation from their families in Ireland and took comfort in finding compatriots still “completely Irish in [their] manners” despite having immigrated twenty years earlier.16 This Irish community was tight-knit and maintained correspondence with relatives in Ireland.17 Music-making was an evening pastime. When Scottish mapmaker and traveler John Melish (1771–1822) needed to spend an hour or two in town October 7, 1806, he was taken to an evening music session of six or eight young men, “most of them Irishmen.” They greeted him with a song written by United Irishman Henry Joy McCracken (1767–1798) about Irish and Scottish unity.18 McCracken's “The Thistle and Shamrock” ended: Our historians and our poets, they always did maintain,That the origin of Scottishmen and Irish were the same.Shea da wea ma wallagh, ma wallagh, ma wallagh,Shea da wea ma wallagh, as brothers we'll remain.Now to conclude and end my song, may we live long to see,The Thistle and the Shamrock, entwine the olive tree.Shea da wea ma wallagh, ma wallagh, ma wallagh,Shea da wea ma wallagh, a hearty health to thee.19Sustaining the sentiments of welcome and unity, the group played jigs, strathspeys, and “Yankee Doodle.” Their hospitality prompted Melish to report that “we united in opinion, that there was no country on the face of the earth like this, where people of all nations, kindred, tongues, and languages could with such happy facility meet and harmonize in the spirit of unity, and in the bond of peace.”20This Irish immigrant community included several men who were both former students at Trinity College in Dublin and United Irishmen. One was John Daly Burk (ca.1776–1808). A deist from Cork, Burk was expelled from Trinity College in 1794. He joined and initiated secret societies within the United Irishmen and was ultimately charged with treason. In 1796, he fled in the clothes of a Miss Daly, whose name he took. Arriving in Boston, Burk began editing a daily newspaper. When it failed in 1797, he moved to New York, where he worked on the Republican Time Piece, wrote plays, and penned his epic poem The Columbiad. Following increasingly sharp attacks on Federalists in 1798, Burk was arrested on charges of sedition and libel.21 Federalists legislated against such immigrants’ ability to become naturalized citizens and delayed some United Irishmen leaders’ entry to the United States.22Assisted by Aaron Burr, Burk did not self-deport as arranged with the Federalist-led government but instead fled to Virginia in 1799 and hid under an assumed name for over two years until Jefferson became president and the Alien and Sedition Acts expired in 1801. Burk became friends with Republican John Randolph, contributed to The Enquirer (Richmond), and was a trustee of Jefferson College.23 He moved to Petersburg later in 1801, served as a lawyer, and became a US citizen the next year. In Katherine L. Brown's assessment, Burk became “the central figure in an émigré community that consisted mainly of Ulster Presbyterians.” Burk had married a widow, Mrs. Christianna Borne Curtis; she died shortly after giving birth to a son.24 Like many United Irishmen, Burk was involved in Republican networks and military efforts. He corresponded with Thomas Jefferson from 1801 to 1805, first about promoting his works and gaining a position as a secretary and later about his efforts to write The History of Virginia (1804–1805). Burk raised and led the Republican Rifle Corps of Petersburg after the HMS Leopard fired on the USS Chesapeake off the Virginia coast in 1807, killing three Americans.25 Observers described him as “high and lofty in his carriage, haughty in his manners, and imperious and impulsive in his disposition” and a man who “exerted great influence over the young men of his day, literally leading them captive at his will.”26In Petersburg, Burk met another United Irishman and Trinity College student: John McCreery.27 Although the circumstances of McCreery's immigration are unclear, Brown locates him in Petersburg by 1797, where he was advertising dry goods for sale. He married Mary Tabb Westwood and they had five children.28 In 1805, he was elected to the board of the Petersburg branch of the Bank of Virginia, elections that required majority Republican representation. His community and political activities included drafting and reporting on resolutions on American anniversaries and British aggression. In 1810, he was “elected Principal of the Petersburg Academy, Virginia.” With his house near Mr. Smith's Female Academy, in 1820 he sought “a few young Ladies” as boarders, noting the pianoforte available for those taking music lessons.29McCreery was dubbed “the son of song,” “the patriotic Irish Bard of Petersburg,” and “the Virginian poet.”30 A prolific songwriter, he supplied odes for celebrations and commemorations.31 His lyrics were featured on the front pages of newspapers, scrapbooked by Thomas Jefferson, and printed with and without music notation.32 In 1823, The Enquirer (Richmond) observed that McCreery's “effusions, possessing the genuine spirits of Poetry, never fail to produce the most happy effect.”33 When he died in Richmond in 1825, he was described as “a gentleman well advanced in years. . . . a man of no ordinary attainments; no less noted for his nobleness of soul, liberality of sentiment and mildness of disposition, than for his poetical genius.”34Burk and McCreery were joined in Petersburg by a third United Irishman and graduate of Trinity College, Dr. Thomas Robinson (1770–1846).35 Robinson was expelled in April 1798 with eighteen other scholars and students, including Robert Emmet, when committees of the United Irishmen were identified in the college. Robinson had lent his rooms for their meetings.36 Using information from United Irishman and Philadelphia resident Dr. James Reynolds (ca.1765–1808), Jefferson relayed to James Monroe in 1800 that Robinson was a United Irishman, “a man of the most excellent morals and excessive modesty” and “of course a good Republican.”37 Robinson taught school in Virginia and studied medicine in Philadelphia before returning to Virginia to marry. John Randolph was a close friend who continued to visit Robinson after he moved from Farmville to Petersburg around 1810 or 1811. Robinson's house in Petersburg often drew visitors of literary, scientific, and artistic backgrounds. McCreery was a “constant visitor” and read his songs to Robinson, who encouraged him to pursue the publication of Irish melodies.38These United Irishmen were well integrated into their local communities, sustained their involvement in education after arriving in the United States, and quickly engaged with leading Republicans at the local, state, and national levels. Their activities were consistent with contemporary notions of citizenship. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the meaning of citizenship was debated and individual citizens’ status was contested. Impressment was a vivid and recurring example of individual citizens’ status being open to interpretation. As Alan Taylor captures through the example of sailor Ned Myers in the War of 1812, a person might reject his birthright as a British subject and become an American citizen by choice. Yet the British contested that status, maintaining that natural-born subjects remained so for life. Indeed, press-gangs seized men at sea suspected of being British and treated them as traitors if they were caught fighting for the United States.39The meaning of citizenship itself was open to debate. A person could be a citizen of a city, a nation, or multiple republics, and some people proclaimed themselves citizens of the world.40 As John McNelis O'Keefe has shown, people in the United States pursued different notions of citizenship before the Civil War, including those founded on transatlantic revolutionary republicanism, racial exclusion, racial egalitarianism, elite local citizenship, and liberalism. Exploration of various understandings of citizenship emphasized membership in a community, rather than loyal subjects. Citizenship was interpreted both in formal terms of legal status and in informal terms of participation in a community.41Burk himself illustrates how one person could understand and position themselves through two different concepts of citizenship. While Burk naturalized, he also articulated an alternate understanding of citizenship, one that his fellow United Irishmen's activities illustrated. Arriving in the United States in 1796, Burk asserted that “From the moment the stranger puts his foot on the soil of America. . . he is virtually a Citizen.”42 As O'Keefe has explained, Burk's assertion was based on a concept of citizenship that was “defined by participation in an imagined public sphere coterminous with the boundaries of the nation.” In this understanding, “radical migrants saw their political agency as an inherent right that entitled them to a form of citizenship.” As O'Keefe has noted, “migrant journalists from the British Isles were among the clearest advocates and practitioners of virtual citizenship,”43 and the collaborators of Petersburg exercised that political agency by participating in Republican organizations, drafting community resolutions, and, ultimately, writing political lyrics.These United Irishmen of Petersburg embarked on a plan to publish Irish melodies with new words that reflected the times, first conceptualizing their project as Virginian in scope, and ultimately expanding it to a national, American scope. Public notice of these collaborators’ musical plans came in October 1806, a week after Melish's visit. The Enquirer announced that two “Irish gentlemen” of Petersburg planned to set their homeland's airs to new English words, much as Burns had done by providing new lyrics for Scottish airs in James Johnson's The Scots Musical Museum (Figure 1). The notice explained that the Irish airs’ original words were obsolete in style or based on ancient stories or ancient “national manners.” The airs’ pairing with these old lyrics was like throwing an “old unfashionable dress” on a beautiful statue. Connoisseurs wanted “to cast off this unseemly garb of antiquity” and replace it with more current lyrics that captured “the feelings and fashions of the times.”44 A brief notice two months later made explicit the political significance of the collaborators’ intent to supply “more affecting words of their own composition,” asserting that this work “will reflect a new lustre upon the literary character of Virginia, and it will contribute to redeem the reputation of a gallant and ingenious nation by restoring to them many affecting Airs, of which their presumptuous oppressors have hitherto robbed them.”45 Despite the Virginian focus, both notices were reprinted in New York.46 The two unnamed Irishmen were Burk and McCreery.47Sample lyrics by Burk accompanied each notice.48 These addressed experiences that would resonate with American readers broadly while also responding to immigrants’ experiences in Ireland. Designated to be sung to a fourteenth-century Irish tune through reference to its eighteenth-century contrafact “Robin Adair,” Burk's verses accompanying the first notice wove together love and war (Figure 1).49 Violence and battle were part of Irish immigrants’ experiences in the 1798 Rebellion and Americans’ recent experience in the Quasi War with France (1798–1800) and the Tripolitan War (1801–1805). Appealing to a broad audience, Burk captured moments of intense emotion between two lovers before being separated by war. Nearly two decades later, Burk's lyrics appeared in an unusual three-voice setting in the collaborators’ A Selection from the Ancient Music of Ireland (1824).50Several of Burk's song lyrics circulated in the periodicals Port Folio and Juvenile Port Folio and fourteen were published in A Selection from the Ancient Music of Ireland.51 Most were romantic. A restrained example was printed in 1807 and reprinted in the 1824 collection to the tune “Thou Flower of Virgins.” While excerpts circulated elsewhere with a placeless dedication to “Miss Eliza J” or “Miss Eliza R,” in the 1824 collection Burk's song was “Addressed to Miss F. __ a beautiful young lady of Richmond, Va.”52 The dedication fixed a local inspiration and audience echoed in published descriptions of the collaborators’ subscription project as “Virginian.”53By 1807, Burk had attached his name to the project and circulated a proposal for publication. He situated the project in a multistate network of Republicans and Irish immigrants who would collect advances. These men, whom he identified as friends, included leading Republicans in Virginia and prominent Irish immigrants in Philadelphia and New York. Among them were several United Irishmen, including Dr. William James MacNeven (1763–1841), a Catholic, and Thomas A. Emmet (1764–1827).54 Having arrived in New York two years earlier, MacNeven was a leader in its Irish immigrant community and a writer of song lyrics.55 Burk also identified William Duane, a notorious Philadelphia Republican newspaperman, self-proclaimed United Irishman, and activist of Irish stock, as the work's expected “superintendent.”56Burk's involvement in the project ended abruptly in early April 1808. A Frenchman challenged him to a duel after taking offense at Burk's remarks in a tavern and fatally shot him in the heart.57 John McCreery sustained their project with Skelton Jones (1775–1812), an American-born Republican lawyer and printer based in Richmond who also sought to complete Burk's History of Virginia.58 In May, Jones and McCreery announced on the first page of Thomas Ritchie's The Enquirer (Richmond) their forthcoming “Proposals, for publishing, by subscirption [sic], THE ANTIENT AND MODERN MUSIC of IRELAND, WITH ORIGINAL SONGS, Suited to the character and expression of its beautiful melodies.” The collection would include both “comic and pathetic” ballads.59McCreery and Jones's proposal clarified that the project was not entirely Irish. As they explained, “Although the music of this collection will be strictly Irish, the words will be as strictly Virginian.” They sought “to enlist in the execution of this work all the poetical talents of the state, both male and female.” Elaborating their interest in women's poetry, they envisioned that in time “some fair daughters of the antient dominion” would rival the “Lesbian and Roman Dames.”60 When invoking their state's seventeenth-century elevation by Charles II to the status of dominion, they linked the “antient” Virginian and “antient” Irish aspects of the work.Burk's “An Historical Essay on the Character and Antiquity of Irish Songs,” printed with the announcement, elaborated on the centuries-old roots of Irish music, including the harp's use before the Christian era. Burk noted that “the Irish were distinguished for their superior excellence in music and poetry.” To attest to the ancientness and quality of Irish music, he quoted Gerald of Wales (ca. 1146–1223), who offered a detailed and evocative description of its superiority and pleasing nature: The attention of this people to musical instruments I find worthy of commendation, in which their skill is beyond all comparison superior to that of any nation I have seen; for in these it is not slow and solemn as in the instruments of Britain, to which we are accustomed; but the sounds are rapid and precipitate, yet at the same time sweet and pleasing. . . . And by their art faultless as throughout, in the midst of their complicated modulation and most intricate arrangement of notes, by a rapidity so sweet, a regularity so irregular, a concord so discordant, the melody is rendered harmonious and perfect.61Bringing his history into the recent past, Burk vigorously strove to correct the record of Irish music history after numerous collections had presented this music as Scottish. In doing so he took a less friendly stance than McCracken had in “The Thistle and the Shamrock.” “Scotland,” Burk declared, “has no music of her own, has contrived to appropriate to herself in what she calls a collection of Scottish music, some of our sweetest melodies the names of whose composers are dear and familiar to every Irishman. They were considered as unclaimed and unappropriated stock. . . and the theft was sanctioned by the genius of Burns.”62 Burk's account responded and added to growing interest in delineating national character and music and to efforts to claim the ancient roots of various European musical traditions, as well as larger debates over the authenticity and Irish basis of Scottish poet James Macpherson's publication The Poems of Ossian.63These debates had captured the attention of a broader American audience, one interested in Irish music. Irish airs offered wide appeal and received praise for their lack of artifice in comparison with more elaborate compositions, such as those of Pleyel. A Philadelphia writer explained that airs like “Patrick's Day” could make a theater audience “catch every sound with rapturous attention—their eyes sparkle with animation, and as complete a silence and pointed attention prevails, as if the sweet-toned lyre of Orpheus himself were charming the rugged rocks and knotty oaks.” As a New York correspondent maintained, such airs “require only to be played to ravish the ear, and wrap the soul in ecstasy.”64Such responses help explain why McCreery envisioned a broad American audience, rather than only Irish immigrants, as the target audience of The Ancient and Modern Music of Ireland.65 By 1810, the project was associated with McCreery in newspapers in New York and Massachusetts, and gathering new lyrics had expanded from Virginian to American in conception. As The Shamrock (New York) quoted McCreery's prospectus, “Though the Music will be Irish, the songs will be American; [See the American Star, in our 4th page] this therefore may be considered, at least in part, a national work.”66 “The American Star,” previously written in response to British naval aggression, illustrated McCreery's ability to integrate American and Irish symbols and values. McCreery called Americans to war to the tune of “Captain O'Kane,” music named for a veteran of European battles and credited to the blind Irish harper Turlough Carolan (1670–1738). With McCreery's references to the symbolic American eagle and American Revolutionary heroes, “The American Star” had gained attention through a national musical contest organized by William Duane to rouse American military ardor in the face of British aggression and was widely reprinted.67 Including this as a sample, McCreery capitalized on the song's wide distribution and familiarity to promote the proposed collection.If Irish immigrants’ description of their new lyrics to Irish tunes as “American” seems surprising when first encountered today, it seems less so when considering the varied ways in which citizenship was then understood. In addition to a formal, legal sense, citizenship was also understood in an informal sense that related to membership in a culture and community. For immigrants like Burk, who expressed his views on the subject, citizenship included a virtual citizenship that was based on membership in a community and was part of a revolutionary transatlantic republican vision defined by shared support for the overthrow of monarchy and tyranny.68The project's shift from a Virginian scope to a national, American one acknowledged not only a broader multistate network of Irish immigrants who might write such new lyrics but also the dual identities they often maintained, as when they saw themselves as citizens of multiple republics.69 As Mary Helen Thuente has observed, songs emerging from the Society of United Irishmen “reveal the conflicted loyalties of persons who are at once emigrant and immigrant.”70 Irish immigrants’ dual allegiances to the United States and Ireland were manifest in both the explicit public statements of those like Burk and in the hybrid identity cultivated by Irish leaders in the South later in the nineteenth century.71 In the early part of the century, this dual allegiance filled various records of the New York Irish immigrant community for which McCreery also wrote songs. Physical manifestations of this dual allegiance included the New York monument erected in Saint Paul's Chapel and Churchyard that honored the memory of Thomas Addis Emmet by featuring an American eagle holding an Irish harp.72 These two symbols also figured prominently in the masthead of The Shamrock (New York), a newspaper serving the city's Irish immigrant population.Advertising in The Shamrock, McCreery took advantage of